Thursday December 15, 2016

How hard is it to get a completely bogus story to the front page of Reddit? Not hard at all as long as you have $200. If you don't have time to read the full article, at least watch the eight and a half minute video we've embedded below:

Reddit’s upvote system can easily be gamed with some bitcoin and a few useful contacts. I know this because my colleague Phil Harper and I successfully managed to place two made-up stories on to influential subreddits /r/UnitedKingdom and /r/Video, which have a combined total of over 13 million subscribers (12 million at the time of our investigation), both of which reached the number one and number two spots. How? With fake accounts and fake upvotes we bought for under $200.